Note: Information contained in these pages is intended as general guidance only. This information is not intended to be, and should not be, relied upon as legal advice. Please consult a legal adviser specialising in intellectual property law for further advice.
Copyright protects an author’s ownership rights to their work. It can exist in different types of works, including texts, images, photographs, art, poetry, plays, music and films. Copyright law, therefore, applies to resources uploaded to the Tes Resources platform, meaning you need to think carefully about what you choose to include and where you source your content.
To avoid infringing on anyone’s intellectual property or breaking copyright rules, it is safe to assume that anything you have not created yourself, and is the work of someone else, is copyright protected.
You may have been allowed to use work created by others in your classroom, for specific educational purposes, but when you are sharing and selling your resources online, permissions are more restricted. You need to check the licensing of any content you have sourced, and check whether you need to seek specific permission to use it.
If you do not own the copyright of any material included in your resources, then you must either obtain consent from the copyright owner to use it or ensure that you can rely on certain permitted uses under the relevant law.
After a certain period, copyright expires and works go into what is called the public domain. Any person can use a work in the public domain without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.
In many countries, such as the UK, this generally happens 70 years after the last creator’s death, bearing in mind that a work may have more than one creator. To establish whether a work is in the public domain, you should ask yourself two questions:
1) Who created the work?
2) When did the creator die?
If the creator died more than 70 years ago, his or her works should be in the public domain in the UK and can be used in the creation of a new work, such as a teaching resource to upload to Tes.
Does copyright apply to my shop name and profile picture?
You must consider copyright when creating a shop and profile on Tes. Certain phrases are trademarked, which means that you cannot use them as your shop name. When you set up your own shop, you should use a name that is, to the best of your knowledge, unique to you. This will not only help you avoid breaking copyright rules, but it will also make you stand out among other resource developers with a similar name.
The same rule applies to your profile picture, shop image and resource cover images. It is important to ensure the images used are not another party’s logos or images that are copyright protected.
To find out more about the duration of copyright in the UK click here:
https://www.gov.uk/copyright/how-long-copyright-lasts
For more information about intellectual property and copyright in the UK click here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/intellectual-property-copyright
For information on the duration of copyright in the US click here:
https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain
For the US Copyright Office’s guide to copyright click here:
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html